I'm not going to lie: sometimes the younger generation frightens me. I'm talking about the ones with the pigtails, 12-inch iPads, juice boxes, and Netflix accounts.
I mean, come on, how can you be seven-years-old and not know what Super Mario is? That's scary.
I even had to explain what Blockbuster was to my teenaged younger brother. I don't remember his response exactly, but I would assume he must have given me an indifferent 'hmm,' then promptly returned to his game of Fortnite.
Honestly, thinking about it makes me more sad than indignant.
As prehistoric as Blockbuster must feel today, I have plenty of happy memories of that store. I cannot tell you how many times I remember walking back to my mom's minivan with a copy of "Sailor Moon" under my arm, the video store's iconic blue and yellow glowing intensely in the background.
That's the beauty of it. Those memories describe a time when things were less complicated (or at least seemed to be).
At 13, my biggest problem was setting up diagrams for English class. Today, my baby brother is 13 and constantly has to worry about police brutality, shootings at restaurants, and powerful government officials that simply don't believe that he deserves the same basic rights and respect as everyone else.
You simply cannot wake up in today's world and not be afraid of something.
It's not okay that his childhood is marred by preventable injustices that he had no part in and that the childhood of children across the U.S. is currently being threatened.
I had the privilege of knowing total security when I went out to breakfast before school started. I had the privilege of playing outside with a water gun and feeling absolutely safe.
I had the privilege of Blockbuster.
Honestly, the younger generation cannot really be blamed for not knowing what Blockbuster is. Someone else let it die out.
Someone else let their childhood become more like a war zone than a trip to the video store every Friday night. The kids are not responsible for the decline in sales.
They may not realize what they're missing out on, but we should. We should see that their time to be clueless and carefree is steadily being robbed from them and that it is our responsibility to stand, fight, and get it back.
